June 14, 2016 AT 11:49 am

Hacker Jeroen Domburg bought a few VFDs and then set about the task of turning one of them into a scrolling clock and sensor display for IoT data. The project includes troubleshooting burn-in on the screen, a beautiful flat-flush seamless case design, and a particularly brilliant hack of removing the MB621468 IC and jumping a number of wires to re-establish connections (part 3 of the build). Check out the results below and read the full step-by-step here on the SpritsMods blog.

Ofcourse, it would be very easy to take a tablet or a Raspberry Pi plus a LCD, install a webbrowser and point it at a statistics page, but where’s the fun in that? We nowadays have enough LCDs around and although IPS panels nowadays are pretty good, the viewing angle still can be a problem. There’s also the aesthetics bits: LCDs are everywhere nowadays, and I wanted something different.